Employee compensation systems, particularly payroll systems, have been developed over time with wide-spread automation of certain steps in the overall processes. However many steps remain as a manual process requiring significant human intervention and resulting in high labor costs. Benefits administration, likewise, has been the subject of some automation, but many steps are performed manually.
The reasons for these manual steps vary with the size of the company. A large company may be able to afford the initial investment in automating a process, which a smaller company would determine to be an inefficient use of resources. Many smaller companies, for example, make use of a payroll service to handle some of these automatable but inefficient for a small single company to deploy tasks.
Even so, a large consideration in all compensation systems is compliance with a myriad of federal, state, and local tax-related and employment-related laws and regulations. Such laws and regulations are frequently changed requiring frequent maintenance of any compensation systems whether automated or manual.
Kahn et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 6,401,079 describe a system for web-based payroll and benefits administration. This development integrates an automated centralized payroll service with a web-based payroll system in an attempt to address some of the concerns noted above.
Bode describes in US Patent Application US 2001/0032119 another method and apparatus for maintaining a payroll. A roster is prepared. Then attendance information pertaining to workers is compared to the roster; and from this comparison, the payroll is prepared.
Brand et al. in US Patent Application US 2004/0049436 describe another payroll automation system. Online analysis of payroll information for a current pay period is done with payroll information from a prior period. The analysis is done before funds are disbursed for the current pay period. This analysis assists in identifying inaccurate payroll events so they may be more easily corrected.
The aforementioned US Patent to Kahn and US Patent applications by Bode and Brand are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.
Nevertheless, in spite of these and other developments, compensation systems are inherently error-prone due to frequent changes in laws and regulations, as well as inaccurate data entry, or an error in calculations.
Because the laws and culture which leads to differing laws and regulations are different in each country, up to now, companies have developed separate compensation systems for each country in which they have a significant number of employees. A company having a global presence, for example may have 60 or more such separate compensation systems.
The term “global” shall be taken herein to mean worldwide, including the United States and Canada, most countries in Europe, Asia, Central and South America, and Mexico. Currently, most companies do not have enough employees in Central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to justify the expense of trying to include these in a global system. This is expected to change in the future so that over time these countries will come to be included in the above definition of “global”.
Large companies and payroll services, therefore, have many different compensation systems because of the large number of countries in which they have employees to compensate. Maintenance of all these separate systems is costly and inefficient. For this reason, it is desired to provide an improved compensation system which can insure compliance with the differing and sometimes conflicting laws and regulations of these differing and autonomous countries.